Rocio Cordova’s Reviews > The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma > Status Update

Discovering your Self in language is always an epiphany, even if finding the words to describe your inner reality can be an agonizing process.

We are a hopeful species.

Working with trauma is as much about remembering how we survived as it is about what is broken.

Our attachment bonds are our greatest protection…Traumatized human beings recover in the context of relationships.

The role of those relationships is to provide physical and emotional safety, including safety from feeling shamed, admonished, or judged, and to bolster the courage to tolerate, face and process the reality of what has happened.

Trauma robs you of the feeling that you are in charge of yourself... the challenge of recovery is to reestablish ownership of your body and your mind - of your self.

This means feeling free to know what you know and to feel what you feel without becoming overwhelmed. enraged, ashamed or collapsed.

When people are in sync with each other, they tend to stand or sit similar ways, and their voices take on the same rhythms. But our mirror neurons also make us vulnerable to others negativity, so that we respond to their anger with fury or are dragged down by their depression.

Whatever happens to a baby contributes to the emotional and perceptual map of the world that its developing brain creates.

If you feel safe and loved, your brain becomes specialized in exploration, play, and cooperation; if you are frightened and unwanted, it specializes in managing feelings of fear and abandonment.

The most important job of the brain is to ensure our survival, even under the most miserable conditions. Everything else is secondary.

When the brains alarm system is turned on, it automatically triggers pre-programmed physical escape plans in the oldest parts of the brain.

When the old brain takes over, it partially shut down the higher brain, our conscious mind, and propels the body to run, hide, fight or on occasion, freeze.

By the time we are fully aware of our situation, our body may already be on the move.

After trauma the world is experienced with a different nervous system. The survivors energy now becomes focused on suppressing inner chaos… These attempts to maintain control over unbearable Physiological reactions can result in a whole range of physical symptoms…This explains why it is critical for trauma treatment to engage the entire organism, body, mind, and brain.

Discovered that helping victims of trauma is profoundly meaningful, but usually it is not enough. The act of telling the story doesn’t necessarily alter the body’s response that remain hypervigilant…for real change to take place, the body needs to learn that the danger has passed and to live in the reality of the present.